The relationship of Hollywood and our entertainment culture to the events of Sept. 11 has been on many people's minds. Here's a collection of links to articles from The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The
Nation, and other publications, about how we view Hollywood -- and how Hollywood views itself -- in the long shadow of Sept. 11.

"[W]e don't trust Hollywood any longer to know us, the mood or the moment,
because for years the movie makers thought that the 17-year-old mind was the
heart of America, that we wanted pictures as frivolous and dumb as 'Pearl
Harbor.' They never felt our aching. They weren't looking at us. They never
knew the yearning."(New York Times, Nov. 4, 2001; registration required.)

"Since the United States began bombing Afghanistan, a chorus of anti-American
rhetoric has filled the streets of the Muslim world from Indonesia to Pakistan
to the Middle East. But there is one place where many Muslims still warmly
embrace what America has to offer -- the local cinema."(CalendarLive on
LATimes.com, Oct. 31, 2001)

"When real-life disasters hit, American movies tend to leave the hard work of
analysis and healing to television docudramas, cable presentations and
independent documentaries. Unfit for the big screen, headlines become fodder
for the small one; important subjects are scorned as 'movie of the week' fare.
Calamities like the AIDS epidemic, for example, were covered by independent
videos and films years ahead of the movie industry."(The Nation, Oct.
15, 2001)

"Warner Bros. has postponed the release of 'Collateral Damage,' an Arnold
Schwarzenegger picture in which a skyscraper is bombed; if Schwarzenegger wants
to do the right thing, he could tell them to cut their losses and drop the
movie, and thus inform moviegoers that the genre, and his own dominance within
it, has officially come to a close. That the destruction of the World Trade
Center might mean goodbye and good riddance to the blockbuster would be among
the most trivial of its many effects, and yet it would somehow hit a national
nerve."(The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001)

"The post-Sept. 11 sanitizing of American pop culture seemed tasteful, even
impressive, at first. A horrific tragedy had occurred, and the gatekeepers of
mass media took it upon themselves to spare us the usual onslaught of
crudeness. ... [T]he country's formerly coarse, mindless, vapid commercial
noises were right there raising the bar for civilization. Then that first week
ended."(Salon.com, Oct. 19, 2001)

"To what extent do Americans' views about retaliation, revenge, and warfare
come more from decades of popular entertainment rather than from sustained
reflections on history and morality?"(Christian Science Monitor, Sept.
26, 2001)

"'These six companies have control of the world,' [Stone] said,
referring to such corporations as Fox and AOL Time Warner. His voice grew
louder as his ideas took shape. 'Michael Eisner decides, 'I can't make a movie
about Martin Luther King, Jr. -- they'll be rioting at the gates of
Disneyland!' That's bullshit! But that's what the new world order is.' There
was a storm of applause. 'They control culture, they control ideas. And I think
the revolt of September 11th was about 'Fuck you! Fuck your order--' 'Excuse me,' a fellow-panelist, Christopher Hitchens, said. 'Revolt?' 'Whatever you want to call it,' Stone said. 'It was state-supported mass murder, using civilians as missiles,' said Hitchens."(The
New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2001)

"The present appeal of movies made during World War II is obvious enough, and
has been apparent in the 'greatest generation' worship of the past few years.
It is tempting to view the 1940's as a less ambiguous, simpler time, in which
the moral choices were clearer and the cultural responses to them emphatically
and intuitively appropriate. The reality at the time, of course, was more
complicated, but the glory of wartime Hollywood nonetheless exerts a powerful
nostalgic pull."(New York Times, Nov. 4, 2001; registration required.)

"If these assorted network, studio, and guild leaders are able to accomplish
anything for the war effort or the Bush administration (so far, the only
concrete request was for extra DVDs), it is not for cynical reasons. It is
because right now they are feeling, like you and me, heart-thumpingly
patriotic. It is actually sweet. (Never forget how many transplanted New
Yorkers are here.) In the words of my favorite Variety headline of all
time, 'Showbiz Rocked by Real Life.'"(Slate.com, Nov. 14, 2001)

"Soon after the terrorist attacks, the conventional wisdom was that comedies
and escapist fare would play best to shaken American audiences. But the
post-attack success of harder-edged violent films such as 'Training Day' and
'Don't Say a Word' showed that not to be the case."(CalendarLive on
LATimes.com, Nov. 5, 2001)

"Indies now form an industry that runs not so much against Hollywood as
parallel to Hollywood. American culture has two legitimate film industries,
mainstream and independent, each grounded in its own organizational structure."
An excerpt from Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent
Film (1999), by Emanuel Levy.

"The fact is that after a 10-year indie boom, independent cinema seems to be
receding into the brackish depths where it waited out most of the 1980s. Even
if such depths are nothing more or less than the Hollywood of today."(LA
Weekly, June 8-14, 2001)

"'Reinvent cinema.' That's such a big concept," says filmmaker Richard
Linklater in this interview. "Maybe a subtler word would be renew. I've always
tried to do that in my own way, try to tell stories that haven't been told or
try to go to places in your head that haven't been seen on film."(indieWIRE, Jan. 9, 2001)

"A slowdown in consumer broadband use could throttle new subscription services
just as the future of digital entertainment appears on the horizon.... While
consumers initially flocked to receive broadband access, only 10 percent of the
United States population has signed on, and growth now is leveling off,
according to the Federal Communications Commission."(Wired News, Nov.
5, 2001)

"Sonicblue, maker of the precedent-setting Rio MP3 players, said it would
release in November the first digital video recorder that links the Net to the
TV. The new ReplayTV model is part of a coming wave of devices that could be
used to download and view the studios' online films, or any other digital
media, on a television. ..."(Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13,
2001)

"As the major Hollywood studios embark on the most ambitious Internet film
distribution project to date, experts warn that delivering huge multimedia
files to potentially millions of consumers will be a daunting and costly task."(InternetWeek, Aug. 23,
2001)

"Last week, five movie studios announced a joint venture that would provide
video-on-demand services over the Internet encoded with Sony's 'Moviefly'
digital rights management technology. They're hoping this will fend off
Napster-like file-swapping services that have plagued the music industry."(Wired News, Aug. 22, 2001)

"The Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory, run by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
Ltd.'s Panasonic Technologies Inc. subsidiary, was set up in April to help an
industry that lives and breathes in celluloid evolve into a digital medium."(Broadband Week, July 9, 2001)

"The hype is that broadband will transform entertainment, changing everything
from how we watch movies to the video games that we play. The reality doesn't
exactly match up."(Technology Review, June 2001)

"Low-budget digital film-making is here to stay and some directors love it. But
what are the consequences for British cultural films if DV is the only option?
Nick James asks five film-makers, one writer and a Film Council funder if it
really is 'Digital or Die?'"(Sight and Sound [UK], October 2001)